Tag Archives: Jewish self-image

June 26, 2023 · 6:30 am

13 Ways of Looking at a Jew

by Bill Siegel (Boston, MA)

1.

Evil takes many forms. To monologist Spalding Gray (Swimming to Cambodia), it’s a nameless cloud drifting around the planet, randomly settling down on humanity now and then –  a Jack the Ripper, an Adolph Hitler, a Pol Pot, an Osama bin Laden. Like a bad dream.

I knew a girl in high school, in the late 1960s, who had recurring dreams in which Nazi soldiers break into her family’s home and take her parents and brother away. When they come to take her, she invariably wakes up screaming, never knowing if, in the dream, they’d taken her or not.

But it’s not a dream. We don’t get to wake up in the morning and shake off the nightmare, breathe a sigh of relief, and return to normal. It can’t be understood and dismissed that easily, because it keeps happening – day after day, night after night, week after week, year after year, generation after generation.

2.

Some people say they are tired of hearing Holocaust stories.

“Enough already, let’s move on,” they say.

“Don’t be such a victim,” they say.

“Don’t try so hard for attention,” they say.

“Stop living in the past, it’s all so boring,” they say.

“It never really even happened,” they say.

That’s what they say.

3.

My nieces – part French-Canadian, not Jewish – are talking. The older one is working on a high school project. “I have to do a collage of images about the Holocaust,” she says. Her younger sister doesn’t even raise her head from her magazine. “Which one?” she asks.

4.

I read a newspaper account of two teenagers who slipped a note into a girl’s backpack as they sat in class studying the work of minority authors. Addressed to “My sweet Jewish princess,” the note explicitly described sexual acts the writer would perform with the girl while pretending to be Hitler. It was written by a girl with her boyfriend’s encouragement. Both of them were charged with second-degree harassment and intimidation based on bigotry or bias, which carries a sentence of up to five years in prison. I don’t know if they were actually tried or convicted, but this was not a first-time occurrence. They apparently had a history of such “antics.”

This happened in the next town to me, in Central Massachusetts, on the eve of the first day of Rosh Hashanah, ushering in the Jewish New Year 5758, in the very Christian year of 1997.

5.

I have letters written by my father from the World War II battle-front in France. Written in Yiddish, using carefully scribed Hebrew letters, they are addressed to his parents, my Bubby Rose and Zayde Harry. I can’t read the Yiddish, but I can make out my father’s name in the letter’s closing. It reads “Dzakie,” the closest he could get to his Americanized name, “Jakie,” since there is no “j” sound in the Hebrew alphabet. His given name in the new land, America, is foreign to his own people.

6.

On Sundays we regularly visited Bubby and Zayde, where my father and Zayde huddled together in a corner of the tiny den, having a lively, though hushed, conversation in fluent Yiddish.  My father might be reading from letters written by Zayde’s brother, who never left Ukraine for America. Other times, Zayde would tell my father what to write, in Yiddish, of course, in letters back to Ukraine.  During these conversations, my mother or Bubby might contribute some valuable bit of information or commentary in Yiddish, though the rest of us, second-born American kids, had no idea what anyone was talking about. Other than a few choice and creatively formulated insults or compliments, they didn’t teach us much of the language.

7.

When my sister was about 16, she rebelled against our weekly visits to Bubby and Zayde’s house.  She was put off by all the “old language” talk and refused to go there again unless everyone spoke English. To this day, it feels like one of the holes in life that can never be filled, something to mourn: the ability to converse with my grandparents in their native language, or at least bathe myself in the sound of it, like a warm, comforting shower.

8.

In Marge Piercy’s novel, Gone to Soldiers, a woman is sitting shiva for her son who was killed in World War II. She is, understandably, devastated. Another woman castigates her for “excessive” grief. “It’s been three days,” she says. “Enough already. Get over it.”

Typically, at the end of the shiva period, which can last for 7 to 8 days, the rabbi takes the family for a walk – around the block, through the village, the neighborhood. The walk guides the family back to an active, purposeful life, and reminds them that the death of their loved one does not signal the end of the world, that though they must never forget the deceased, they are still obligated to continue moving forward — or else, as the rabbi told my mother at shiva for my father, “They will never get all the way around the block.”

What it is not, is an occasion for scolding anyone for their grief.

9.

After my father’s death, after sitting shiva, I find myself in a synagogue that I’ve never been to before. I’ve come to say the Mourner’s Kaddish for him. It’s early morning, but the service has already begun. I’m wearing a black lapel pin and black ribbon snipped by my mother’s scissors, identifying me as someone in mourning, someone who has lost someone. One of the men, dressed in a tallis and cradling an open prayer book, greets me at the door and welcomes me in. Another one comes over to me before I’ve found a seat, and asks who my people are and who I’m mourning for. 

I’ve found a place to be.

10.

The Kaddish prayers, unlike almost all of the other Jewish prayers, are written in ancient pre-Hebrew Aramaic, likely dating back more than 2,600 years, to mourn the destruction of the First Temple. Every time I chant it, I feel grounded in the here and now, but with tendrils connecting me to Jews all around the planet reciting it at the same time I am, as well as  to an unending stream of mourners going back millenia. 

Kabbalah teaches that Creation is made up of “worlds beyond our world,” in time, in space, in spirit. Standing with congregants in early morning, reciting the Mourner’s Kaddish, I feel at home in that multi-dimensional, eternal Universe.

And that is good enough.

11.

There are rules: 

Keep a kosher kitchen. 

Stay with your own kind. 

Go to shul. 

Fast on Yom Kippur. 

Find a nice Jewish girl. 

Get an education.

Be a doctor or a lawyer. 

Be a mensch. 

Don’t marry a shiksa.

But so many Jews try so hard not to be Jewish. Or at least not to be recognized as such. Even in shul, I was taught from a young age to “assimilate” into American culture and society. They never taught us quite how we were supposed to do that, but even as a child I somehow knew that “assimilate” meant “camouflage yourself,” hide, blend into the background, don’t call attention to yourself and your Jewishness. That way – maybe, just maybe – you’d be safe.

12.

“That’s funny, you don’t look Jewish” — the bitter-sweet punch line that doesn’t really need a joke. It’s a tag line in and of itself. We laugh at it, almost proudly, as if it’s recognition of having done a good job of assimilating.

13.

I sometimes believe that there are many people (Jews among them) who will be secretly, and perhaps not so secretly, relieved when the last Holocaust survivor passes on. Maybe they don’t want to confront the truth so directly, the horror, the pain.  But they’re mistaken. Yes, the day will soon come when the last of the victims of Hitler’s death camps are gone. 

But “last survivor?” Never. Survivors of the Holocaust are born every day.

* * * * * * * * * *

Bill Siegel lives in the Boston MA area, and writes both prose and poetry – about family, fishing, jazz, and more. He has two manuscripts in process: “Printed Scraps”, poems inspired by Japanese woodblock prints; and “Waiting to Go Home”, about family and memories of growing up. His work has been published in “Beyond Lament: Poets of the World Bearing Witness to the Holocaust” (Northwestern University Press), and “Indigenous Pop: Native American Music from Jazz to Hip Hop” (University of Arizona Press). His poems also appear in Blue Mesa Review, Rust+Moth, JerryJazzMusician, Brilliant Corners, and InMotion Magazine, among others.

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May 29, 2023 · 6:30 am

I Wanted to Be More Jewish

by Carol Blatter (Tucson, AZ)

My dad died of lung cancer on January 16, 1965. I was twenty-two. I remember Mom and me trying to find his tallit to be used in his burial which was tucked away somewhere in the apartment. Luckily we found it. Do I ever remember him wearing his tallit? No. Why would he? He didn’t go to synagogue on the Sabbath to engage in prayer. Nor on other holidays either. 

Because he had a hard life and had to work long hours including on Shabbat and on Jewish holidays, he left behind any Jewish observance. (I am assuming that he had some Jewish education in his childhood but I never had a way of verifying or refuting this. All my dad’s  family are deceased).

Jewish practice could not heal his losses. He lost his dad when Grandma locked his dad out permanently for his abusive behavior. Dad, the oldest child, lost his childhood when he became a dad for his family. He lost the love and attention from his mom, my grandmother, who was raising Dad’s three younger siblings. He lost an education when he dropped out of school in eighth grade to support his family. He lost his sense of self-esteem and the ability to earn a good living in his adult life. 

I grew up in a Jewish and Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn, NY. I always knew that I was Jewish. Most of our neighbors were Jewish. An Italian family lived next door. I thought that we had a good relationship with them. Maybe it was a superficial relationship because we were of different faiths. Thinking back I realize they never came to our apartment. Did my parents ever invite them even for a cup of coffee and chat? Did they ever invite us to their apartment for a cup of coffee and a chat? Not that I can ever remember.

We had a dance toward the end of sixth grade before graduation. John Mortorello, a very nice Italian boy, asked me to the dance. When I told my parents, Dad was incensed. He probably said something like, I can’t believe that you are going to a dance with an Italian boy. He was visibly upset. It’s hard to remember my reaction. I wanted to go to the dance and I was content to go with John. Mom didn’t say anything. I don’t think I knew much about prejudice. But I was beginning to learn. I still went to the dance with John. Did Dad have bad memories of having been beaten up by some Italian and Irish kids when he was a kid? Does that explain his reaction? 

Did he fear that eventually I would meet and date and, perhaps, marry a non-Jewish boy? I have no idea what he thought. 

Dad had an ice cream parlor and luncheonette when I was growing up. Many Syrian Jews frequented the store. For some reason Dad kept complaining about the Syrians. Why complain about the customers who brought income into the store? And why pick on other Jews just because they originated in Syria? Not from Minsk or Pinsk or Brooklyn? Not Ashkenazi Jews? Were their skins darker than ours? Did they have accents that made it difficult for them to be understood? I wonder what dad really feared. What I do know is that he feared the goyim. But Sephardic Jews are not the goyim. 

Dad and I never talked about our religion. I don’t think that I learned anything about our Jewish traditions from Dad. Showing was a way of teaching, and Dad was not a role model for Jewish practices.

My recollection is that neither Dad nor Mom went to the neighborhood synagogue on Kol Nidre night nor on the following day. I have my doubts that they prayed at home and fasted. I never saw this happen. What was strange was Dad taking on the role of a taskmaster on Kol Nidre night. I can still hear him telling me what I wasn’t allowed do. I couldn’t turn on the radio. I couldn’t watch TV. I couldn’t read. There wasn’t anything I was allowed to do. What was going on with Dad? Why this strange behavior? Why was he so harsh? So dictatorial? When did Dad ever tell me what to do or not do on other Jewish holidays? Not once that I can remember. In telling me the rules of Yom Kippur as interpreted by my dad, perhaps he was assuaging his guilt for his own non-observance. He could tell himself he was a good parent keeping me in line Jewishly. It is as if he fulfilled his obligations as a Jew even when he didn’t.

I was ten and in fifth grade. I told my parents that I wanted to fast on Yom Kippur. They appeared shocked and surprised. Imagine seeing my parents standing there frozen like two statues facing a traumatic event. I wondered. Did they think I was too young to make an informed decision? Did they think that I might die if I fasted? After their brief whispered chat, they agreed I could fast but only until 3 PM. I was ok with that. But they didn’t say anything about fasting with me.

I’m thinking back to when my dad sat shiva for his dad. I was eight years old. It confirmed that  my dad had some knowledge of Jewish traditions. He followed the Jewish practice of mourning for his dad. Despite a life-long fractured relationship, he knew he had to sit shiva. He had to say goodbye to his dad in this traditional way. Maybe in his dad’s death, he forgave him.

Thinking about all the main Jewish holidays, Sukkot, Purim, Passover, Shavuot, Rosh Ha’Shanah, Yom Kippur, and Chanukah, I can’t remember any family celebrations. I don’t know if I knew so little about these holidays that I didn’t feel a sense of loss. Maybe in a subconscious way, I did. Somewhere in my childhood, I decided I wanted to be more Jewish. Where this came from I have no idea. But it has shaped my entire adult life. 

I’m proud to be an observant Jew.

—

Carol J. Wechsler Blatter is a recently retired psychotherapist in private practice. She has contributed writings to Chaleur Press, Story Circle Network Journal and One Woman’s Day; stories in Writing it Real anthologies, Mishearing: Miseries, Mysteries, and Misbehaviors, Real Women Write: Growing/ Older, Real Women Write: Seeing Through Their Eyes, Story Circle Network’s Kitchen Table Stories, The Jewish Writing Project, Jewish Literary Journal, New Millennium Writings, 101words.org, and poems in Story Circle Network’s Real Women Write, Beyond Covid: Leaning into Tomorrow, and Covenant of the Generations by Women of Reform Judaism. She is a wife, mother, and grandmother. 

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August 23, 2021 · 6:48 am

T’shuvah

Chris Farrar (Columbus, OH)

I’ve been Jewish all my life, but for the first 17 years I didn’t know it.  It’s fair to say that I didn’t really know what “Jewish” was.  In fact, once when I was 8 or so, I went with a friend to Mass, and then told his mother – to her great delight – that I was definitely going to be Catholic.

Well wouldn’t she be surprised.

My father was raised Baptist but really had no interest in religion.  My mother’s family was Jewish, but very secular. 

I, my sister and brother were raised without any religion or religious connection.  Due to my father’s influence, I imagine, we always had a Christmas tree, we went on Easter egg hunts and generally did the things that Christian families did.  But nothing Jewish.

I grew up without any of the normal Jewish childhood experiences.  No Yom Kippur.  No synagogue.  No Passover.  No summer camp.  “David melech yisrael” would have been just a string of sounds in a catchy tune.

It was as if my mother’s Jewish heritage didn’t exist. 

So here’s what happened.

Some time in the middle of high school I underwent knee surgery and had to stay home for several days.  After exhausting all the science fiction in the house I was desperate for something to read.  The only thing I could find was “The Source” by James Michener.

This novel takes place in Israel in the early 60s.  It looks at the history of the Jews through the lens of an archaeological dig.  The site is a fictitious tel named “Makor.”   In Hebrew the word means “source.” 

When I finished that book I knew I was Jewish and I grabbed at it with both hands.  I read book after book on the history of the Jews.  I took courses.  I even joined the Jewish Defense League for a while, until I came to understand them better.

Later I lived on a kibbutz in Israel and learned Hebrew.  I taught it at the university as a TA.  I married a wonderful Jewish woman and raised three amazing Jewish children.  And now there’s a Jewish son-in-law and a new generation of Jewish grandchildren.

Early in my relationship with Judaism, after I returned from Israel, it seemed to me that the only way to be Jewish was to be ultra-Orthodox.  The Chasidim were the saving remnant, the keepers of the sacred flame.  I moved into the Lubavitcher Chabad House at UCLA.  I put on tefillin every morning.  I kept kosher.  I kept the Sabbath. 

This lasted a month.  At the end of the month I knew I couldn’t be Jewish in that way.  I wasn’t even sure I believed in God.   Not, at any rate, the way I needed to in order to live the Lubavitcher life.  That wasn’t going to be my connection to Judaism. 

Instead, as it has developed over the years, my connection has been to the Hebrew language, to the holidays, to my family and to the history of the Bible and of the land of Israel as understood through the perspective of archaeology.

So.  T’shuvah.

On Yom Kippur we think of it as repentance.

What it really means is “return.”

For me it’s been a return to a history that is my history, to a language that is my language and to a land that is my land.

And it’s a return to a book of writings so compelling in its message that it has become the foundation of our whole concept of the obligations of our shared humanity.

 And for me, more even than this, it means a return to wonder.

Who were these people, my ancestors? How did they live? How did they think?  They were a tiny outpost of humanity, living in a poor nation, smaller than many US counties.  They were ravaged horribly by powerful nations, not once but over and over again.  They lost their Temple and their sacred city but somehow, uniquely among ancient peoples, they didn’t lose their God. 

How did they, among all peoples, develop the moral, ethical and spiritual foundation now embraced by half the world’s population?

If they could see how the power of their belief has cascaded down the centuries, what would they think of it?  What would they think of the re-emergence of their nation in its own land, of the resurrection of their language?

Would they recognize their God?  Would they see Him in the miracles of the Tanakh?  Would they see Him in the rebirth of the land of Israel?  Would they see Him in the spread of their vision through Christianity and Islam? 

Or maybe they would see Him in the way a day of teenage boredom can change a person irrevocably, sending reverberations not only down the decades of his own life but also down the lives of generations to come.

So, back to t’shuvah.  Return.

Not just a return to history; but rather, perhaps, a return to the future.

Chris Farrar grew up in southern California, earned a doctorate in linguistics, and worked in technology marketing and, eventually, in data analytics. His first novel, By the Waters of Babylon, follows twelve-year-old Ya’el as she’s deported to Babylon after the siege of Jerusalem in 586 BCE. The novel is available on Amazon,  Barnes & Noble, Kobo and Apple Books. If you’d like to learn more about Chris and his work, visit his website: christopherfarrar.com.

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January 23, 2017 · 9:53 am

Not That Jewish

by Mel Glenn (Brooklyn, NY)

I constantly debate my Jewishness,
or lack thereof.
Let’s look at the facts:
I don’t know any of the 613 laws,
much less obey them.
I almost never go to shul,
except on the High Holy Days.
(Do not ask me why I go then.)
My mother was not raised Jewish,
even though her mother was.
(Can Jews skip a generation?)
My sons were Bar-Mitzvahed.
(Did that make me or them more Jewish?)
I do not follow the news from Israel,
much less the news from my local synagogue.
I do not keep kosher,
nor do I light Friday night candles.
Yet, despite all of the above,
I still feel Jewish.
I am a Jew, by God, aren’t I?
Only not that much.

The author of twelve books for young adults, Mel Glenn has lived nearly all his life in Brooklyn, NY, where he taught English at A. Lincoln High School for thirty-one years.  Lately, he’s been writing poetry, and you can find his most recent poems in the YA anthology, This Family Is Driving Me Crazy, edited by M. Jerry Weiss.

If you’d like to learn more about his work, visit: http://www.melglenn.com/

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November 23, 2009 · 7:13 am

Our Hairy Jewish Bodies, Ourselves

by Van “Zev” Wallach (Stamford, CT)

Let’s not beat around the bush. I’m that hairy Jewish guy, built more like Esau than Jacob, who comics and cartoonists love to lampoon. While I’m bald on top, genetics compensated me with swirls of fur everywhere else: arms, legs, shoulders and back. I’d be a terrible criminal because I leave curly DNA evidence everywhere I go.

The look has pleased me since a line of hair first ran down my chest starting in the seventh grade. An early bloomer, I was. I still delight to see the hair poke up at the top of my shirts, like a wash of black foam on a beach of skin. At real beaches, I shuck my shirt to stroll about in my barrel-chested Russian-Jewish glory. At my health club, sleeveless t-shirts display my shoulders and their halo of hair, what I see as a living tattoo of shapes, shadows and textures.

I grew up with positive media hair images, like Sean Connery in his 007 days and Burt Reynolds with his April 1972 Cosmopolitan centerfold. The hippies of the 1960s, who let their freak flag fly, gave me confidence with my own evolving body. That’s just who I am, man. Impending baldness rankled me, since I knew, as the latest in a long line of bald Wallachs, I’d lose hair on top in my 20s. But that happened so gradually that I barely noticed and hardly cared.

Then over the past 20 years or so a new look emerged, favoring shrunken-chested Euromen with less body hair than a Chihuahua. Media images taunted my curl-enclosed physique. Ads in the Village Voice celebrate hair removal via laser and other technologies. The pages of GQ and Esquire glisten with images of young men of marbleized features, with nothing on their hard but hairless abs and chests. A recent cartoon in The New Yorker by Roz Chast, about an updated version of the 10 plagues of the Exodus, showed a girl on a beach recoiling from a man with a hairy back, under the title, “Unwanted Body Hair!”

And I’ll never forget the derision heaped on the poor “40 Year Old Virgin” for his hairy chest, which drove him to a salon for a wax-and-rip treatment. Actor Steve Carell, who really did undergo this painful procedure on screen, got big laughs with his outbursts of yowls and curses, but the obvious message made me wince. The message:

Male body hair = social handicap.

The negativity corroded my confident body image like battery acid on ice cream. When I turned 50, I suddenly noticed that I’m afflicted with “Hobbit ears,” with their feathery outcroppings. Gazing into a mirror, I saw not a jolly bald Jewish guy with glasses and a goatee, but – a Hebraic Quasimodo, scorned by the elegantly cruel Esmeraldas of the shtetl called JDate. I finally bought a Conair ear/nose/eyebrow trimmer to keep my ears in check. Even after that, the ads in the Village Voice took on new urgency. Dare I revise 40 years of acceptance for a buttery post-millennial look?

I thought, “Surely other men deal with these issues.” Online, however, I found little serious discussion of male body issues. The articles sounded vague and forced, ruminations on Brad Pitt envy, men with eating disorders, steroid use to get that ripped look; I read nothing compelling or even particularly relevant.

I did discover The Men’s Seder, a project of the Men of Reform Judaism that nods toward the unexplored land of Jewish men and their bodies. Topics for the seder include “What enslaves us as men?”, “How do we evaluate success?” and “What are the plagues of being a man?” According to one review, the new plagues include “prostate cancer, weight gain, hair loss and impotence.” I can imagine the discussion: “On this night we are all like unleavened bread, because we cannot rise. Farewell, my shankbone.”

In my research, nothing I read about men and body image even approached the agony found in the books, articles, seminars and conferences on women and body image. While I’m content to muse fondly on my hirsuteness, I learned that women strategize, rage, fret and commiserate over their bodies at great length.

And the intensity spirals upward when Jewish women raise the issue. A commentator on the Jewish Women’s Archive site wrote,

I’ve watched incredibly talented, beautiful, intelligent, and critically-thinking girls and women locked into an eternal struggle with their bodies to conform to an arbitrary and unreachable standards. For Jewish women especially, the tension between a rich food culture, contradictory ideals of the zaftig and the rail-thin, and the constant confusion of being accepted into mainstream (read: white) culture while trying to maintain a unique ethno-cultural identity is one that leads far too many people to unhealthy and dangerous relationships with food and the mirror.

Blogger Rachel Lucas struck a less academic note when she wrote, after flipping through an issue of Maxim magazine,

Are women not feeling shitty enough about ourselves? Are we not as hyper-critical of our looks as we should be? Do you desire that we have it kicked into our heads as much as possible that we can never ever FUCKING EVER live up to your expectations of what women should look like? Do you wish to ensure that once we reach a certain age or pass that threshold of 115 pounds, we accept that we are ‘unsexy’? Thank you sir, can I have another? And guys wonder why we don’t like having sex in bright light, why we’re afraid to prance around in lingerie, why we take an hour to put on makeup and do our hair.

As painfully relevant as such reflections are when I think about the Jewish women I’ve known and cared for, they don’t do give me much to chew over on male issues. Since men don’t dare talk about these matters outside the Men’s Seder (“Hey, how’s your prostate hangin’ these days?” or “Still hitting the Viagra for Shabbat afternoon?” are not questions that come naturally to our lips), I’m on my own to decide how I relate to the “mainstream (read: white) culture” and its standards for men. Would I shrivel in the white-hot presence of Brad Pitt? Would the Chihuahuas of GQ hammer me into a state of depression over my height, my baldness, my pathetic lack of Matthew McConaughey-ness?

I am pleased to report: no on all counts. Other than my indulgence in an ear-hair trimmer, I decided to keep accepting myself as I am. Certainly the women in my life have never complained, at least not to my face. I successfully fought the urge to call one of those Village Voice advertisers for a wax-and-rip. My hairy Jewish body is – my physical self. I’ll never deny that. I get positive reinforcement of this attitude by watching lots of Israeli movies. They’re enjoyable because they show bald hairy Jewish guys doing cool things (e.g., driving tanks, shtupping) without a dollop of irony or self-loathing.

And lately, hairy guys are winning more respect. My self-confidence has bounced further back, Hobbit ears be damned. A friend on Facebook posted a link to a blog about actor Hugh Jackman’s fuzzed-up chest. I commented, “Fausta – you can rest even easier after looking at some of my profile photos. Hugh Jackman is a Euro-girlie man compared to, well, me.” Men’s fashion magazines show more natural, fuzzy models.

A British newspaper ran pro-and-con essays with the title “Hairy Chests or Polished Pecs?”, complete with photos. Arguing the “Yes, oh my God, YES!” (my paraphrase) position was Tanya Gold, who winsomely explained, “I am a Jewish woman and making passionate love to textiles is in my genes. But the real reason that I love a hairy chest is this – when you see hair nestling like a headless squirrel on your beloved’s chest you know you have a man in your bed. Not a metrosexual, but Man. Grrr.”

Often, I revel in the presence of men with the same look. At my gym, I’ve checked out other guys and vice versa, in a silent but friendly male competition to see who’s got the baddest, hairiest – whatever.

This spring, I’ve felt deep kinship with a Chasidic man who exercises at the same time I do. Off come the black hat and suit, on go the gym clothes. Once we stood in line for a shower and I marveled at the tribal similarity. While he was much heavier than me and older, our backs and shoulders looked identical. We never spoke but in that silent fraternity of the shower line I knew we were landsmen. We both come from the same Eastern European stock, two guys whose families crawled out of the mud of Ukrainian shtetls to eventually deposit their hirsute offspring in the United States, where we unashamedly maintain our burly physiques. Here are two Yids who’ll never get a back waxing. Roz Chast may find us horrifying, but that’s her problem, not ours.

And I can acknowledge that a hairy Jewish body offers loads of amusement. The look intersects with my daily routine in odd ways. Take medical procedures like EKGs. When I turned 50 and revised a life insurance policy, an insurance company operative came to my apartment to administer an EKG. Her first try failed because the electrical leads wouldn’t stay connected to my chest. They floated atop a follicular ocean, not touching any bit of skin. Gallantly, I offered to shave some strategic patches so she could get me hooked up. She agreed, so I spent 15 minutes in the bathroom hacking at the underbrush until I burrowed down to relatively bare skin. The EKG attachments worked well this time, although I fell into a yowling Steve Carell mood when I yanked them off my newly scraped flesh. Ouch! I can’t say this was exactly fun, but the episode amused me, and the hair grew back more luxuriant than ever, as I knew it would from past medical procedures.

The most satisfying affirmation of my look came way back in May 1987, when somebody went beyond furtive looks to – poke me in wonder. I was attending the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival then. The fun, the sun, the music and the crawfish made me groggy by mid-afternoon, so I stretched out on the ground, shirt off, hat over my eyes.

I had dozed off when somebody started playing with my feet. I opened my eyes and saw two young women sitting down by my feet. “You’re lucky I have such an amiable disposition,” I mumbled.

“Did you pass out?” asked one of the women in a heavy Southern accent. She had dark hair and said her name was Monie.

“I’m just tired,” I said.

“Let’s rub his stomach! That will wake him up,” cried Monie, the chattier of the two.

She did that – and was agog at what she found. “Why you are just the hairiest man Ah’ve ever seen,” she exclaimed. “Can I call you Curly?”

They had come to the festival from Mississippi with a male friend for the music and to see the sites. Well, they got a sight to see in me. Monie kept running her finger down my chest. I didn’t mind her frisky explorations.

“I bet you moan,” I told Monie, but my Mississippi Queen was too sloshed to get my drift.

I had my camera so I snapped a picture of her demonstrating what looked like a drunken Cajun-Caribbean limbo dance move. We listened to music for a while under the pounding New Orleans sun. Finally I handed the camera to their male buddy so he could capture my special moment with Mississippi Mona and her friend. And I’ve got the visual proof of her hand running wild through the Jewish jungle.

Van “Zev” Wallach is a writer based in Stamford, Connecticut. A native of Mission, Texas, he holds an economics degree from Princeton University. Van writes frequently on religion, politics and other matters. His interests include travel, digital photography, world music and blogging, which he does at Kesher Talk http://keshertalk.com/, where this piece originally appeared earlier this year.

“Our Hairy Jewish Bodies, Ourselves” is reprinted with permission of the author.

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